Each reader reads only what is already within himself. The book is only a sort of optical instrument which the writer offers to the reader to enable the latter to discover in himself what he would not have found but for the aid of the book.

It is often hard to bear the tears that we ourselves have caused.

Reading is at the threshold of spiritual life; it can introduce us to it; it does not constitute it. There are, however, certain cases, certain pathological cases, so to speak, of spiritual depression in which reading can become a sort of curative discipline and assume the task, through repeated stimulation, of continuously reintroducing a lazy mind into the life of the spirit.

But sometimes the future is latent in us without our knowing it, and our supposedly lying words foreshadow an imminent reality.

We feel in one world, we think and name in another. Between the two we can set up a system of references, but we cannot fill in the gap.

...the nose is generally the organ in which stupidity is most readily displayed.

My destination is no longer a place, rather a new way of seeing.